Enabling people of all abilities to access content quickly and easily

Submitted by Andrea Cowan

on 24 July 2014 - 12:27am

Making content web-accessible to a wide range of users is important to our ScienceDirect developers. So much so that Elsevier has hosted a web accessibility and assistive technologies collaboration group with several universities since 2011. The group meets regularly and looks at how to improve ScienceDirect for users with disabilities or impairments to ensure compliance with guidelines and standards (such as those in the US) from around the world. Through this input, we’ve found that making ScienceDirect accessible for disabled users turns out to be good for everyone. Well-structured pages, content in HTML and PDF, searchable text in PDFs, logical cursor placement when opening dialog windows and panes, the ability to enlarge pages and text, and unique and descriptive page titles are examples of accessibility elements now in ScienceDirect that help all users more easily find and read content that is relevant to their work.

Universal text and symbols to indicate web-accessible features

Most updates we make to ScienceDirect contain an accessibility enhancement or two, guided by the valuable contributions made by our Collaboration group. You can read more behind the story of this group here. We also keep a complete outline of the current web accessibility features built into ScienceDirect updated and available here. And if you are (or know) someone in your organization who evaluates web-accessible products, email us at accessibility@elsevier.com and ask about joining our Collaboration group. You can use the same email address to report any accessibility issues with ScienceDirect, too.

This post was contributed by Kira Cooper, Director of Global Marketing Communication for Academic & Government Research Markets at Elsevier, San Diego, California.